Recruitment for many companies is not transactional, but about building relationships, especially in the West. If companies forge relationships with potential candidates, they are most likely to choose them over others.

The startup helps its clients reach out to passive candidates once in two-three months to update them about the company’s culture, wishing them on their birthday, anniversaries, festivals, etc. Unlike active candidates, passive candidates are those candidates who are currently not looking for any employment opportunity outside their existing company.

Co-founder Amritanshu Anand says, “Pro-active recruiting means reaching out to passive candidates. This is more cost-effective. Our client companies don’t just sell them the job, but the company. It’s about a company building a talent network or pool that will be useful to fill in positions in future.”

He adds, “There is an opportunity cost involved in not creating a talent pool. If someone leaves a job, it takes about six months to fill that position. But if you already have a talent pool ready, the company can reach out to candidates and help in quickly filling the position.”

Starting up

Of the three co-founders, Recruiterflow is Amritanshu and Manan Shah’s second startup. Amritanshu and Manan started BetaGlide, a mobile analytics company in Noida in 2013. BetaGlide was acquired by InShorts in 2015 and both worked at InShorts for more than a year before starting up again with a third co-founder, Naresh Shenoy, in December 2016. All three co-founders are alumni of IIT Kharagpur.

About their stint at InShorts, Amritanshu, says, “We were hiring close to 20 people a month. Since we didn’t have an official recruiter, all the team heads were doing this job. We were using sales software to hire people. So, when we quit InShorts, we started thinking of starting something to do with recruitment.”

The founders spoke to around 150 recruiters from US, Europe, Australia before they started. While Manan is the CEO, Naresh is the CTO and Amritanshu looks after products and business.

Globally, it competes with BullHorn, ICIMS, Greenhouse and Jobvite. The recruitment market size is $2.5 billion globally, of which $1 billion is of software for recruitment agencies’ market and $1.5 billion is software for companies. Right now, the company is focussing on agencies.

While they faced more challenges in their first startup, in their second startup, the co-founders were more informed and mature. In their first startup, Amritanshu and Manan had overhired and raised funding before actually reaching a product market scale. The lessons learnt helped them in setting up and running the second startup.

Amritanshu Anand, co-founder, Recruiterflow

How it works

Recruiterflow works on a subscription model beginning at $69 per user per month. Since the startup helps companies to establish relationships with thousands of candidates, the process of maintaining the relationship is automated.

“Our systems operate on top of G-Suite and office 365 (Google and Microsoft email). All mails sent to candidates are captured and stored in the system automatically. No manual work is required to capture these data. We have integrated with Linkedin, GitHub and AngelList. Our system is also integrated with the Chrome browser. So when you open your Linkedin account and go to a profile on Chrome browser, you can see an extension of RecruiterFlow.”

“When you click on the extension, it will pull all the information from the profile concerned,” says Amritanshu. The cloud server is based in Europe, and the database is stored in these servers.

Revenue based on two models

The startup has two models – for recruitment agencies and companies. Amritanshu adds, “Seventy percent of our revenue comes from recruitment agencies. The pricing for a recruitment agency is $69 per user per month. For companies, it starts at $120 per month. In companies, the fee is not per user basis, but on the number of open jobs (the number of jobs openings they are working to fill). So, for smaller companies who might be filling 3-4 openings, they pay $120 per month.” The startup has more than 50 clients across US, Europe, Canada, and India.

The startup generates a monthly revenue of $11,000. “A lot of recruiters helped us build our product. We reached out to them for buying our products, too. Also, we reached a few through cold email, networks, digital marketing, etc,” says Amritanshu.

Future plans

“Currently we have $50,000 – $60,000 sitting in our bank account. We now have to figure how to use that money to increase our growth rate. Once we do that by March, we will probably reach out to investors and raise half-a-million to one million,” he says.

In the next two years, the startup plans to build more automation and AI into the platform and penetrate deeper into US, UK and Canadian markets.

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